Society

I very rarely talk about payments on this blog, but every once in a while I get to talk about something I think might be interesting: network tokens! Who has my card number? Many years ago, merchants selling products online and in person were handling your card details directly. That

A manifesto for funding AI-native nonprofits

Trying to ‘let it rip’ in early 2020 was a disaster.

Why False Equivalence Is One of Democracy’s Most Dangerous Lies

Hello and welcome to the latest premium edition of Where's Your Ed At, I appreciate any and all of your subscriptions. I work very hard on these, and they help pay for the costs of running Ghost and, well, my time investigating different things. If you're on the fence, subscribe!

Weeknotes 350 - Can AI truly perform critical thinking as it does not have a clue? How to bring in humbleness through our own interactions? This and more from last week's news on human-AI-thing collabs.

Valve Corporation recently came under pressure from payment processors to purge Steam, the popular PC gaming storefront, of “certain kinds of adult-only content.” The news rippled across tech …

In her new book “Bad Company,” journalist Megan Greenwell chronicles how private equity upended industries from health care to local news—and the ways workers are fighting back.

On December 30, 2024, a stunning event captured the attention of both locals and space experts when a massive metal ring crashed from the sky into a Kenyan village southeast of Nairobi. The 2.5-meter diameter object, weighing approximately 500 kilograms, landed in a field without causing injuries but immediately sparked…

Pentagon press releases say 20,000 federal troops have deployed to support ICE across the country. The real number may be markedly higher.

One staffer at an agency where the deregulation tool was tested said that it made several errors.

Megan Brenan writing for Gallup: Independents Drive Trump's Approval to 37% Second-Term Low Six months into his second term, President Donald Trump’s job approval rating has dipped to 37%, the lowest of this term and just slightly higher than his all-time worst rating of 34% at the end of

Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, shared the below communication with Microsoft employees this morning. As we begin a new fiscal year, I’ve been reflecting on the road we’ve traveled together and the path ahead. Before anything else, I want to speak to what’s been weighing heavily on me, and what I know many of you...

Or did it?

Though we're pretty sure that time travelers don't exist, people were working on hypertext -- used by web browsers to retrieve connected information -- long before computers. It even predates the ideas of a certain Vannevar Bush, the man generally acknowledged as having laid the groundwork for hypertext by microfiche in a seminal 1945 article. Nope, according to the Atlantic, some people were pondering ways of storing and retrieving information prior even to the 20th century. A Belgian genius called Paul Otlet posited an idea in 1895 about "universal libraries" to give anyone access to a vast number of books. By 1934 he had refined it to "electronic telescopes" that would connect people instantly to books, films, audio recordings and photos.

Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.

In around 90 days, millions of Americans will learn about out-of-pocket cost hikes of more than 75 percent on average.

Law journal article that looks at the Dual_EC_PRNG backdoor from a US constitutional perspective: Abstract: The National Security Agency (NSA) reportedly paid and pressured technology companies to trick their customers into using vulnerable encryption products. This Article examines whether any of three theories removed the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that this be reasonable. The first is that a challenge to the encryption backdoor might fail for want of a search or seizure. The Article rejects this both because the Amendment reaches some vulnerabilities apart from the searches and seizures they enable and because the creation of this vulnerability was itself a search or seizure. The second is that the role of the technology companies might have brought this backdoor within the private-search doctrine. The Article criticizes the doctrine­ particularly its origins in Burdeau v. McDowell­and argues that if it ever should apply, it should not here. The last is that the customers might have waived their Fourth Amendment rights under the third-party doctrine. The Article rejects this both because the customers were not on notice of the backdoor and because historical understandings of the Amendment would not have tolerated it. The Article concludes that none of these theories removed the Amendment’s reasonableness requirement...

The skies overhead are already teeming with satellites. But their orbiting numbers will skyrocket in the near future as the commercial and international space race takes off. Three projects alone — SpaceX’s Starlink, China’s Guowang megaconstellation, and Donald Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile defense system — will launch tens of thousands of new satellites. Today’s […]

Hacked data obtained by 404 Media reveals dozens more people on deportation flights to El Salvador who are unaccounted for. “We have not heard from these people’s families, so I think perhaps even they don’t know," one lawyer said.